Month: December 2012

People usually ask me why did you draw a sad girl? I don’t usually draw sad people, or particularly enjoy it, but occasionally I find a story behind a particular face I am drawing, and sometimes the story is sad. I make up characters as I am drawing them, they have background stories and issues.

The more i work on her, the more the story is revealed to me: this girl is feeling regret, but i don’t know why, maybe it is about a lost lover. It is something she did, she pushed him away. Something in her gaze tells me she knows though that the game though is not over yet, but can she do what it needs to be done in order to get him back. Would it be worth it?

(I was inspired by the sad eyes of an actress i saw on TV, but that woman has long blond hair with brown eyes. I felt those sad eyes belonged on a brunette with short wavy hair.)

I love books, especially the classics. I like reading them on paper and watching their movie adaptations and, like many, what I would really, really like to see is a movie adaptation that will not lose, or utterly destroy, the essence of the literature the author has worked so hard on.

I know this is close to impossible, that is until tablets arrived.

Me and some very talented friends of mine are working into making a new reading experience that is in between reading a paper book and watching the movie. Our goal is to engage the reader with highly artistic illustrations, sound effects, animation, and in some cases narration as well for tablets as ebooks.

Paparoona is our young ebook publishing company named after the poppy flower (paparoona is Greek for poppy), the reason that it grows with wild weed but spreads color in otherwise plain field made it very appealing to us.

So we started out with something very close to my heart “The Raven” by Edgard Allan Poe. In this poem, we see its narrator, who is at first a seemingly normal person, descend into madness by all the possible meanings of the word “Nevermore.” This is the only word that is uttered by the raven which has flown in his room. We know the reason for the narrator’s downfall, it is that his wife has recently died, and we can’t blame him. Who among us will see a beloved deceased person again in this lifetime? and what about the next? Is there a next? Such questions are asked in this poem, and what makes them all the more important is the fact that Poe wrote this poem as his beloved wife was dying in the room.

The Raven is a tragedy written musically. The words rhyme mathematically in each verse, it’s a pleasure to the ear and so we just could not resist not having it narrated. And we didn’t just have it narrated. We employed a professional voice actor and we asked him to act the poem out. We added sound effects to fully captivate the drama.

The illustrations are all very well done and could have been paintings. We put a lot of effort in each little detail. We wanted to make something visually interesting as well and take full advantage of the highly defined screens on tablets.

At the end we were very proud of what we had achieved. The Raven (in iBook format), now available on Apple ibookstore, is Paparoona’s firstborn.

Now we are off to new literary challenge and we are so very excited to try something different. I will not reveal just yet which beloved piece of classic literature we have chosen, but here’s a hint, this time it’s going to be a science fiction novel.